One summer night in 2017, I remember standing in our small neighborhood park, talking to a neighbor. We were both on crutches. I’d had foot surgery; she had a broken ankle. Her husband had just been diagnosed with cancer. His prognosis was not good. Meanwhile, we had a new president.      

 “Well, you know what they say,” she said to me. “Just another AFOG.”

 “AFOG?”

 “Oh, you don’t know? AFOG: Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth.”

 Growth.

News flash: we don’t just get old. We grow old. And growth is not painless. “Getting old” is something that just… happens. Such as fading. Or rusting. Or wrinkling. “Growth” takes work. Like a seed pushing a shoot upward towards the light on the other side of the soil. Like the shoot inching its way, for decades, towards becoming a tree. Like a broken bone, healing far more slowly when you’re sixty-something than when you’re six.

AFOG.

My husband and I started the month of June at a campground on the waterfall-laden Lewis River, southeast of Mt. St. Helens in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. A century ago, after the brutal Yacolt fires of 1902, the land that became our campground was likely nothing but a ghostly stand of charred timber. Now, the second growth trees are so tall it’s hard to believe they haven’t been standing for hundreds of years.

We started the month of July backpacking on the Hoh River trail in the heart of the Olympic National Park, where there are trees of all ages, from seedlings to 600-year-old skyscraper homes for mosses, ferns, insects, birds and brand-new trees springing straight up from their thickest branches.

In between our two forest trips? There was June 2025: a month of daily—sometimes hourly—can-you-top-this news reports, and not all of them were coming from the White House. Police in central Washington state spent the month searching for a man who killed his three little girls. He is still at large, or possibly dead. In happier news, New Yorkers surprised the world by selecting Zohran Mamdani as their democratic mayoral candidate.

Meanwhile, more than five million of us marched on June 14, “No Kings Day.” I was still carrying the “Hands Off Our Forests and Parks” sign I made for the big march back in April. (In another scrap of happy news, Utah Senator Mike Lee’s proposal to sell off public lands was one of the few awful things cut from the recently passed Big Ugly Bill.)

Meanwhile. I find myself using that word a lot these days. Because so much is happening all at once. Meanwhile, for example, one reason I haven’t posted here lately is that I have been substitute-teaching English as a second language at the refugee agency where I normally volunteer. After the first day, I wasn’t sure I could do it again, but I did. After twenty days, I felt like I might have improved—actually grown, as a teacher—at least a little.

But meanwhile, there are other reasons it’s been hard to write. There’s that nagging feeling that no one wants to hear from someone who is getting old. Yes, I am, and I’ve got the wrinkles to prove it. But I’m also growing old. Or trying to.

Like the trees on the Lewis River, and the Hoh. And the millions of trees on public lands that won’t be sold off after all, because so many people—young and old, Democrat, Republican and independent—carried signs, and wrote and called their lawmakers, and made some noise about the places they care about. I wish we could’ve done the same for the millions of Americans on Medicaid. I don’t think any of them need more AFOGs than they’ve already got.

In 2017, if you had told anyone in these United States who did not vote for Donald Trump that eight years later, we would be facing the most overwhelming collective AFOG ever—a second Trump term, complete with a Supreme Court stocked with Trump cheerleaders—you would have been told NO: that is simply unbelievable. But here we are.

When we left the Hoh on July 5, Rustin counted 223 cars waiting in line to enter the Olympic National Park. This is good: our parks and forests need friends. But the numbers mean a reservations-only system, like we now have at Mt. Rainier, is probably not far off. And that will be good too. Because trees of all ages need protection. The old giants need peace and space to nurture their young offspring. To keep growing old. And people who are growing older—which means all of us—need peace and space too. So that we can do more than just get old. So that we, too, can keep growing.

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Getting more serious about digital photography? Ready to take a class? Nick Thompson is teaching an online course through Interlochen Center for the Arts, beginning July 14.